More positive economic news is on the way, but...

Last weekend, the Mail predicted that more positive economic news was on the way and, yesterday, it duly arrived.

The Office for National Statistics announced that, between July and September, the economy grew by an encouraging one per cent – signalling the end of the longest double dip recession since the 1950s.

It is the best quarterly growth since 2007 and caps a good two weeks for David Cameron’s government – with inflation and unemployment down and private firms more than making up for state job cuts.

Recovery: The U.K. economy grew by a higher than expected 1 per cent in the three months from July to September, the Office for National Statistics said

Yet, as George Osborne was careful to acknowledge yesterday, there is still a very long way to go.

The eurozone, so vital to Britain’s export market, remains in turmoil, with even the mighty German economy at risk of slipping into recession.

The closure of Ford’s Southampton van factory and its stamping plant at Dagenham – a decision the company blamed on the ‘persistent economic crisis in Europe’ – is a painful reminder of just how vulnerable the UK will be if the single currency finally implodes.

Ministers will also have to work hard to overcome the confidence-sapping uncertainty being cultivated by Ed Balls and a relentlessly doom-mongering BBC.

Even yesterday the Shadow Chancellor – desperate to deflect attention from the ruinous deficit Labour was running even before the great crash of 2008 – was implying the return to growth was the result of the Olympics, and may not last.

In fact, the Games contributed only one fifth of the increase in GDP, which was largely fuelled by an impressive performance by the service sector.

But, if Mr Osborne is to build on this success, he must be bold. He must not be afraid to make further cuts in still bloated state spending to fund the tax cuts required to stimulate demand. He must set business free from red tape.

Crucially, he must look beyond the creaking, sclerotic economies of Europe and strengthen our commercial ties with the world’s emerging economies.

The stakes could not be higher.

Dehumanising death

Phyllis Nicholls, who died alone on a 'Care Pathway'

In recent days, this paper has highlighted the concerns of doctors and distressed families over the Liverpool Care Pathway, the official guidelines under which patients judged to be dying are left without treatment, food or fluids.

Their fear is that, with more than 100,000 patients ending their lives on the LCP each year, the Pathway is being used to hasten death and free up hospital beds.

NHS managers insist this is not the case and the only intention is to give the dying a dignified end.

Yet doesn’t this statement rest uneasily with today’s revelation that hospitals are being offered financial incentives – worth millions of pounds – to place a fixed number of patients on the LCP?

Providing a monetary motive to bring a person’s life to a potentially premature end is dehumanising and morally wrong.Ministers must end this appalling practice if they do not want faith in the LCP to be undermined still further.

Real benefit scandal

'Welfare dependency': Iain Duncan Smith

Yesterday, Iain Duncan Smith was again under attack from the Left over his determined attempt to cure the insidious, socially-harmful and utterly unaffordable British disease of welfare dependency.

His hand-wringing opponents argue that, by limiting handouts to families which refuse to try to find work, youngsters are being condemned to a life of poverty.

The real scandal is a system that incentivises parents not to get out of bed in a morning and almost certainly traps their children in a life of dependency themselves.